Many building and facilities, such as industrial facilities, data centers, retail stores, and residences, are equipped with access control/intrusion detection systems. In a typical system, alarms from a system are routed over a computer network to a monitoring post, such as a command center or a field-based alarm monitoring post. The monitoring post may be staffed by monitoring personnel who are assigned to monitor computer systems. The computer systems may display to the monitoring personnel the nature and location of the alarms as they are displayed or annunciated. The displayed information may be used by the monitoring personnel to identify who should be contacted or dispatched to investigate the cause of the alarm.
The person tasked with responding to an alarm may be commonly referred to as the alarm responder, or simply the “responder”. Once tasked with investigating the cause of the alarm, the responder may proceed to the location of the alarm event, determine the cause of the alarm, and report the responder's findings back to the monitoring post.
In many systems, remote identification and assessment of an alarm, dispatch to a responder to the alarm, and clearing of the alarm, requires the intervention of a person at many stages in the process. For example, a monitor may need to interpret the nature of the alarm, identify the appropriate person to respond to the alarm, send a notice to the appropriate person. The monitor may wait for acknowledgement that the responder has accepted the alarm and also for subsequent notices that the responder has arrived at the site of the alarm system, cleared the alarm, etc. The monitoring personnel's activities may thus involve a significant amount of human resources. In addition, each one of the interventions introduces the possibility of a defect into the process, for example, if monitoring personnel misidentify the nature or location of the alarm, contact the wrong responder, or miscommunicate the cause of the alarm. Moreover, in many systems, there may not be a complete record of the time it takes to complete an alarm lifecycle, which limits the ability to measure and improve process times. Moreover, monitoring personnel may have limited capacity to monitor whether a responder is overdue from returning from the location of an alarm. An overdue responder may indicate that person has encountered a serious situation involving the responder's personal safety.
Some network-based alarm systems may lack the ability to easily mask an alarm. In some systems, for example, masking an alarm may involve programming a device, such as a door contact, to not generate an alarm when the door has been opened and while the security system is active. Such programming may have to be completed by a trained person with high level access permissions into the programming of the security system.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.